Spivak,
Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of A Discipline. New York: Columbia
UP.
Spivak begins this book
(lecture notes?) with a questioning of disciplinarity that patrols the
cultural-ideological border between the first-world-based comparativist frame
and the third-world-oriented area studies.
Spivak briefly traces the origins of this boundary-making in the
post-WWII Cold War context that had different ramifications in Europe and Africa
and Asia:
If the “origin” of Area
Studies was the aftermath of the Cold War, the “origin” of U.S. Comparative
Literature had something of a relationship with the events that secured it: the
flights of European intellectuals…from “totalitarian” regimes in Europe. One might say that U.S. Comparative
Literature was founded on inter-European hospitality, even as Area Studies had
been spawned by interregional vigilance.
(8)
This symbiotic genesis of
Comparative Literature and Area Studies marks the ground on which Spivak
advances her thinking in collectivities and planetarity, a model for what she
calls the new Comparative Literature, which is “supplemented” by Area Studies
with an approach to “the language of the other not only as a ‘field’ language”
(9). The methodology for such a new
interdisciplinary approach is as follows:
We cannot not try to open
up, from the inside, the colonialism of European national language-based
Comparative Literature and the Cold War format of Area Studies, and infect
history and anthropology with the “other” as producer of knowledge. From the inside, acknowledging
complicity. No accusations. No excuses. Rather, learning the protocol of those
disciplines, turning them around, laboriously, not only by building
institutional bridges but also by persistent curricular interventions. The most difficult thing here is to
resist mere appropriation by the dominant.
(11)
What Spivak proposes here is
a challenging task. It is a very
slippery step away from the traditional model of knowledge production—meaning,
object—be it language, people, culture, or customs, as the source of knowledge,
the fertile ground from which certain primitive accumulation of knowledge
capital can be achieved. Spivak’s
proposal is a “laborious” endeavor to turn the site of production from
object-naming and object-analysis to a field of an engaged self-other
relation. In other words, while
invoking the specter of the other is the first step of collaboration with and
transformation of the old disciplines, the acknowledgement of “the ‘other’ as
producer of knowledge” has to be turned against “us” to question our
positionality as an “investigator” or “researcher.” This methodological reversal suggests an
“effortful task,” not to bring the others into our own universe, as it was
practiced in Area Studies, or to judge others in the views of ours, as rehearsed
in traditional Comparative Literature, but to imagine and perhaps better yet,
envision, us with the others in a collective process working towards plain of
coexistence.
This in my view is why the
opening question for Spivak, “Who are we?”, is truly an important one. On what plain can we be imagined as a
collectivity. (This implicitly
harks back to Marx’s notion of species-being, which in my view is not about
defining human essence on the level of physiology, but about the conditions of
harmonious coexistence.) Spivak
attempts collectivity by opening up the discussion of “the fear of
undecidability” (25), which in essence is about policing the boundary—be it of
disciplinary, national, or sexual differences. Spivak contends that “collectivities are
underterminable” (27) and believes that “one cannot access another directly and
with a guarantee” (30). Conjuring
up Derridean terms like teleopoiesis and poiesis (imaginative making), Spivak
seems to suggest that collectivity is possible onlt in the risky business of
making (meaning “copying and pasting” [34]), a gesture of reaching out, with a
clear sense of practical provisionality, since the others are not explicitly
“knowable.” “Open-plan
fieldwork…[s]ketchy words, imprecise description” (36) implies a space of great
uncertainty in which description has to be worked, negotiated, and constantly
revised. Open-plan fieldwork does
not lay out the collectivities as they are “described,” but calls for
interpretation: inter-diction that interrupts comprehensive
intelligibility. Thus, Spivak
argues:
To think of learning this
from precapitalist formations and yet to help insert them into lines of
mobility, we cannot simply be bad-faith emissaries of globalization that assigns
itself the status to train women of “other places” to be women. To be encountered by them as women, we
must work to make these other pasts come: “they would come if we worked for
them.” Not only is this not gender
training, it is not even “learning about cultures.” This is imagining yourself, really
letting yourself be imagined (experience that impossibility) without guarantees,
by and in another culture, perhaps.
(52)
The plain for such
imagining, for Spivak, is not the globe, but the planet. How is the planet different from the
globe though? Spivak explains
below:
The globe is on our
computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to
control it. The planet is in the
species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on
loan. It is not really amenable to
a neat contrast with the globe….When I invoke the planet, I think of the effort
required to figure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition. (72)
To be human is to be
intended toward the other…If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather
than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity
remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as
much as it flings us away.
(73)
As Spivak explains further
via Freud’s concept of “the uncanny,” I sense that Spivak is giving a Marxian
spin on the notion of planetarity—indicating how globalization as a historical
process has created a drastic alienation on earth, thus rendering the familiar
unfamiliar and the organic whole as separate entities. As she noted on the contemporary Ethnic
Studies in the U.S., “It [Ethnic Studies] must now learn to play with Area
Studies, emphasizing the textuality of the language of “ethnic origin,”
producing that inter-dictive ‘and yet’ when either patient polyglot transference
(Irigaray) or impatient dismissal (Gilbert and Gubar) seems to appropriate
center stage” (76). This suggestion
is a pointing critique of the division of labor between ethnic and area studies,
which was an unfortunate result of the Cold War geopolitics, in which the ethnic
has to disclaim an immediate connection with its origin, while the area mindset
sustains the geopolitical hierarchy that posits the ethnic as the middle passage
from the Third World to the First.
The question of temporality thus becomes an interpretive element in
differentiating Ethnic Studies and Area Studies as the present (progress) versus
the (backward) past. In the space
of Asia-Pacific especially, as Spivak points out, “It is with this ensemble that
the divided and diversified story of Asian America, old and new immigrants, must
be imaginatively cobbled to make for a robust Comparative Literature”
(85).
At the end of the book,
Spivak locates her reading of planetarity on the materiality of the Earth, thus
calling forth some sort of international formation on the one hand, and a
reconfiguration of national landscape on the other. Invoking Jose Marti’s powerful sentence,
“Cities are the minds of nations; but their hearts, where the blood rushes back
and from where it is redistributed, are in the countryside,” Spivak
elaborates:
The country here is not
simply the prenational as opposed to the national. It is also the hyle or mass of the
national, to which the blood rushes first and that becomes continuous with the
exchange with the Earth. The Earth
is a paranational image that can substitute for international and can perhaps
provide, today, a displaced site for the imagination of planetarity. (95)
In reference to Raymond
Williams’s theorization of the country-city relationship that spares sympathy on
the mass that toils the land, Spivak, here, is invoking a left-minded
participation in the re-formation of collectivities that do not necessarily
require the nation-state as the base.
As the last century has witnessed the violent potentiality within any
national (be it colonial or postcolonial) collectivity, which inevitably leads
to a fascist formation (the most notable example recently is Taiwan under the
“aegis” of nativist consciousness), the call for planetarity suggests to me a
disappointment of the postcolonial project of national liberation, which
oftentimes bears the traces of neo-colonialism on the one hand, and a useful
rearticulation of Marxian humanism that should function as the planetary ground
of commonality. To imagine
planetarity from “the precapitalist cultures” (101), as Spivak urges, is
undoubtedly a difficult task, given the saturation of capitalist mindset across
the globe today in name of American culture. Nonetheless, it remains to be a critical
task for intellectuals to “show me the way” (to paraphrase the catch phrase in
the Tom Cruise film Jerry Macquire, “Show me the money!”)—a way that will
gesture towards an international popular to form counter-collectivities against
the “transnational popular” of global capitalism.
Having summarized or rather
annotated Spivak’s book thus far, I begin to feel uncertain about the call for
uncertainty, which in a way is a responsible claim on the cultural left. However, it will not be a claim that
would be conducive to the formation of an international popular, for a sense of
certainty is precisely what capitalism has to offer. To use Jerry Macquire again as an
example, “show me the money” is a simple and clear trajectory to follow,
something objective that can be worked out in the system. Happiness, freedom, and non-alienated
life are concepts far too abstract and somehow already co-opted and appropriated
by, and remanufactured into tangible commodities. If thought versus commodity is the form
of struggle between the cultural-internationalist left and the
capitalist-nationalist right, then how would the notion of planetarity help us
reclaim the earth on which thought is being pushed out by commodities. Which planet are the cultural left
living in anyway? I agree with
Spivak’s idea that the others are not be accessed with guarantee, which is an
important cautionary note for intellectuals in general; however, how would that
humble assumption relate to the rural, third world masses, who are toiling for a
certainty of accessing the first world, metropolitan other. Will that uncertainty serve the
capitalist incentive for meritocracy and upward mobility, as the overachieving
Asians have done? Or will that
uncertainty simply tell them to forget it and to succumb to the cultural
political economic order of globalization, as Asians will not be Americans no
matter how Americanized they are? I
would like to believe that this sense of uncertainty engenders a site of
struggle, a struggle that will somehow reset the terms of struggle, but as the
present moment has dawned on us, I cannot quite catch the glimmers of
hope.